By now, you’ve probably heard of the robotic vehicles that are being put to the task in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unmanned drones fly miles above terrorists, spying and even dropping missiles. Robots trained in bomb disassembly have been a huge help to the US army so far. The best thing about robotics automation is that it protects human life and is therefore very cost-effective. However, there are many more surprises stemming from robotics technology that have yet to be unveiled. The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference in Washington DC let us in on a few of these futuristic vehicles.
We’ve heard this claim before. In the next forty years, we will have robotic vehicles drive us! Dewar Donnithorne-Tait from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International says that by 2050, it will be safer, cheaper and easier to use automated vehicles and that most people will be doing so. The military is already developing a semi-autonomous ground vehicle called the MDARS machine, which chooses its own routes, drives itself, detects intruders, runs diagnostics, avoids obstacles and communicates with the locks to ensure they haven’t been tampered with. The autonomous robots can drive with others on the road, runs for 16 hours on a tank of petrol and will be one of twelve machines monitored by a soldier at a time.
Civilian robotic vehicles are also being developed for a number of uses. Sonar robotics technology is capturing never-before-seen images of deep sea beds with the Synthetic Aperture Sonar. Farmers use these vehicles to check on their crops. Forest rangers count trees and monitor wildlife in remote regions of their parks. Surface water vehicles are skimming the coasts, while underwater devices are recovering old shipwrecks and AWOL lobster traps that have fallen loose, thus threatening endangered marine animals.
The current question is, “How big and how complicated do robotic vehicles need to be?” To investigate further, BAE Systems developed a network of robotic bugs, namely spiders, dragonflies, bees and grasshoppers that work cohesively as a unit. These bugs (known collectively as “WolfPack”) can monitor and spy, map information flow, trigger electronic jamming or even recharge their own batteries. The next generation will be capable of camouflaging themselves, deceiving enemy combatants, processing information and making decisions based on intelligence. To some, having these new robotic bugs that make decisions and spy on us may seem a bit daunting. Yet for the US military, this is a true breakthrough that will keep our soldiers safer and eliminate the need to send human life across enemy lines.